March 21, 2013

"He contemplated suicide, he said, but could not summon the nerve. In 1989 Mr. Reems, then living in Park City, Utah, stopped drinking with the help of a 12-step program. He converted to Christianity, obtained his real estate license and married Jeanne Sterret in 1990... [He] led a life of contented small-town obscurity in Midway, Utah, golfing, attending church and collecting Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia. He retained the name Harry Reems, he said in interviews, as a proud emblem of an odyssey he did not regret."

72 comments:

The word "dumpster", first used commercially in 1936,[1] came from the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks, which was patented by Dempster Brothers in 1937.[2][3] The containers were called Dumpsters, a portmanteau of the company's name with the word dump. However, it took the Dempster Dumpmaster, the first successful front-loading garbage truck (which used this system), to popularize the word.The word dumpster has had at least 3 trademarks associated with it by Dempster Brothers,[4][5][6] but today it is often used as a genericized trademark.

So Reems was down and out until he met Jeanne Sterret who was able to give him a Christian life for the last 23 years. Good woman.

Her name Sterret ( also spelled Sterritt) is a Scots Irish name from county Armagh, Ireland. It was called bloody Armagh during the border wars with the Catholics in the 1600s. Only the strong survived. The name Sterritt translates, Strong One.

In 1989 Reems contemplated suicide as a homeless dumpster diver and in one year, one year! he had gone the whole hog to marriage, Christianity and a real estate license. That's a dude who can get it up hard and get it up fast!

"fetched up" - yes, heard that phrase before. Kind of an old-timey way of saying a person "ended up" or "washed up" or "landed" at a particular location, with the implication that it had been a storied life journey getting to that location.

Dumpster is a totally proper noun. I'm surprised to see it questioned.

You see, it started as part of the Dewey-Dumpster System where large square metal trash bins with lids are arranged for pick up alphabetically by street name. It was a terrible system and failed immediately. It turned out the whole thing was easier and a lot cheaper just doing the next street over no matter the name.

He fetched up in Los Angeles, begging on the streets and sleeping in Dumpsters.

Oddest sentence in any otherwise decent obit. I think the author got a liitle carried away. Saying, "He ended up in Los Angeles," sounds as dull and dreary as ... the NY Times usually is. I've never seen the d in dumpster capitalized either.

Maybe he wasn't sleeping in garbage dumpsters. Maybe "Dumpster" was a nickname for a friend, as in, "He ended up in LA, begging in the streets, and sleeping in Dumpster's [apartment]."

"Dumpster's" being the home of Linda Lovelace, Cum Dumpster extraordinaire, of course.

I saw yesterday an interview with him, somewhere on the 'net, from the CBC in the 80s, in which he talked about the Govt charges against him, and I was impressed by how articulate he was in describing how foolish the Govt case was.

You know who else died? This gets me. One of the two brothers whose family fetched up on the Louisiana Swamp and was featured on Swamp People. Presumably hunting alligators but I never saw these two brothers actually catch one of those.

Mitchell Guist fell on his boat and died.

Fans of the show express their sympathy and shared grief on his Facebook page.

That show freaks me out because I forget there actually are people out there living very differently.

They show a big round fat guy that I didn't much care for who wears a star spangled stripped bandana on his head and overalls flap wrapping his extended belly.

They landed on his old duck hunting camp and the place was torn up from a storm that destroyed everything and tossed things like trash, sinking everything.

He reminisced about his grand pa and the things they did there. But I felt no sympathy. None. It's just a swamp.It's just a hunting camp.

Then they showed the pictures of the life that was there once. And it was a real and full life, more than a camp, with a regular house and regular tables and chairs and regular people doing usual things, and you see more fully what was forfeited and that round guy was so broken up, he suddenly became a real person and not just a character in a show.

And the never do show who did the poaching. They catch the guys on camera and show the result boat # "159" is all you see, and apparently two boats, and they leave it to the authorities. So the resolution to the poaching thing is unsatisfactory.

He sure took an unusual path on his journey to God. Well, Buddha said that sensuality is a step towards divinity. Seems a little extreme, but I'm glad his life had a happy ending....The bet here is that John Holmes remains the iconic porn star--the one Hollywood chooses for its cautionary tales. We like to think that debauchery ends in depravity and early death rather than a real estate license and Christian renewal. This is not a narrative that the people who make movies can understand. The vagaries of life are beyond all comprehension.

"Fetched up": Yes. It may be Sothron or Mid-Western, but it's not all that rare.

"Dumpster": Yes. It's still under trademark. Lawyers for Dempster-Dumpster send friendly letters to reporters who forget to capitalize the name. The lawyers are protecting the name from becoming genericized.

While jokes can be made, this was still a "fallen man" that had many problems...and through effort..picked himself up and made his later years something to be proud of.

Redemption. What tens of millions of others with problems hope will happen to them as well. And many, like Reems, will get there after ending drugs, sobriety, getting out of prison.That is no joke.That is core to our life's quest. More so with some than others.

Edutcher...Scotch is a whiskey brewed by the Scots. Scots that colonized Northern Ireland may drink scotch but call themselves Scots. If an intentional slur mispronunciation happened in American history made by those afraid of them and jealous of them, so what.

Edutcher...Scotch is a whiskey brewed by the Scots. Scots that colonized Northern Ireland may drink scotch but call themselves Scots. If an intentional slur mispronunciation happened in American history made by those afraid of them and jealous of them, so what.

Hate to tell you, but that "intentional slur mispronunciation" IS American history.

And I never heard anyone of Scotch-Irish ancestry (and I went to school with plenty of them) ever object until James Webb started having pretensions.

My recollection is that Linda Lovelace also left the porn business and actually campaigned against it. She and Harry are reasons that those of us who are inclined to "let everyone do their own thing" should at least think twice. There are prices to be paid, which we aren't the ones who pay.

Yes, I've also heard/read "fetched up" used that way. My recollection has it connected with nautical usage, as someone suggested, and the use in Huckleberry Finn, although riverine, is consistent with that. (Ann, you ought to consider following up your Fitzgerald/Gatsby sentences with Twain/H. Finn sentences.)

I first heard the word "Dumpster" in 1969 in Army Basic Training ("take that garbage out and put it in the Dumpster, troop!"), but the mess sergeant didn't specify whether it was a proper name or not, and I didn't ask.

In Grauman's Chinese Theater they have 200 handprints of famous stars... In the Nike Museum in Portland they have a copy of Shaq's size 28 sneaker.... Is it too late to get an impression of it for the Yellow Movie Hall of Fame?

""fetched up" - yes, heard that phrase before. Kind of an old-timey way of saying a person "ended up" or "washed up" or "landed" at a particular location, with the implication that it had been a storied life journey getting to that location."

Yes. I've heard it over the years in nautical/beach connection especially, older literature/usage, along the lines of "a bottle or a shark carcass fetched up on the beach."

Don't remember its use there, but the overall sense of Tennyson's Enoch Arden is about a person fetched up from the sea into his home.

Surprised Althouse is unfamiliar with the expression, and seems Chip Ahoy is as well.

I would choose his life over one limited to just one of those two parts, but I'm eclectic. I can't say if living sober and Christian is satisfying, but I think that if you throw in a few years of partying and screwing lots of young beautiful women and getting paid for it, then it's hard to say he didn't live a life of having it all.

It's the male version of feminists who want to have a satisfying career, and be a stay-at-home mom, and he pulled it off.

Why wouldn't he keep his fake porn name? It would be good for business. Those who know what it is wouldn't mind, and the prudes would likely not know...or be primed for the salvation story. Either way, the name recognition benefitted him.